On 10 December 2025, Al-Haq, Al-Mezan and Addameer made two joint submissions to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese, in response to her call for input for her upcoming thematic report on torture to the Human Rights Council’s 61st Session in March 2026.
Special Rapporteur Albanese will investigate both specific acts and specific acts and methods of torture and ill-treatment committed against Palestinians and structural or collective practices that intentionally inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering for prohibited purposes, including punishment, intimidation, coercion, and discrimination. Hence, the first submission documents Israel’s deployment of torture as a deliberate state policy against Palestinian men, women, and children held arbitrarily. Nearly two years into Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, by September 2025, at least 75 Palestinians had died in Israeli custody due to the abusive conditions, mistreatment, and torture inflicted by Israeli authorities. This figure underscores a clear intensification in Israel’s systematic and widespread resort to torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, in blatant breach of Article 2 of the Convention against Torture (CAT), the Fourth Geneva Convention, and the jus cogens prohibition of torture. Testimonies collected and included in the report further corroborate findings by the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel, which documented the routine use of severe sexual and gender-based violence, such as rape, genital beatings, and forced nudity, alongside starvation, denial of water, cage confinement, physical and verbal assaults, electrocution, and other extreme forms of violence.
The second report draws crucial attention to structural and collective Israeli practices outside detention contexts, including: State-sponsored settler violence to further oppress, dominate and forcibly displace the Palestinian people; the mass forcible transfer of Palestinians in Gaza; widespread and systematic home demolitions; the use of Palestinians as human shields; and the deployment of military dogs to attack and terrorise Palestinian children and adults alike. These measures, carried out with the intent to racially dominate and destroy the Palestinian people as a whole, are carried out to purposefully inflict severe mental suffering. Therefore, and with supporting testimony, the submitting organisations outlined the grounds upon which these practices constitute collective and psychological torture, as well as the genocidal act of inflicting serious mental harm in view of Israel’s intent to destroy the Palestinian people. Drawing on jurisprudence from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the report demonstrates how Israel’s mass forcible transfer of Palestinians in Gaza forms a central component of its ongoing genocide, given the gravity of the mental harm deliberately imposed. The report also stresses that such practices reinforce Israel’s framework of racial domination and oppression, amounting to the crime against humanity of apartheid.
Critically, the submitting organisations situate Israel’s pervasive and systematic use of both physical and psychological torture across unlawfully occupied Palestine within Israel’s broader settler-colonial apartheid regime and its long-term project of Palestinian erasure. Although Israel’s widespread and systematic use of torture against Palestinians is not novel, since Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October 2023 there has been a clear escalation of longstanding patterns of torture, humiliation and abuse that began even before the establishment of Israel in 1948. This dangerous development, for which Israel maintains total impunity, must be brought to an immediate halt. States must uphold their binding legal obligations under international law, including the duty to prevent and punish genocide and respect and ensure respect for international humanitarian law.
Submission Ⅰ can be found here.
Submission ⅠⅠ can be found here.